


Batonnet

by cognomen



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-13
Updated: 2014-07-13
Packaged: 2018-02-08 16:40:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1948473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Will Graham wants access to Dr. Lecter's house. He wants to stand again in the kitchen and feel specters haunting him there, smell the faint earthy scent of herbs  in the next room, growing live in the very walls. </i><br/> <br/><i>The specific gravity of the place hangs opposite pendulums in his heart and mind. He had found his way there dreaming awake. </i></p><p>  <i>Now, he is barred. Will sits in his car with his hand over the permanent scar of his rebirth. Hannibal had given it to him, just deep enough. Just hard enough that the blood held his alibi.</i></p><p> </p><p>Character study. Post Season 2 Finale. Spoilers in a vague way. Old dog Will Graham learning a new trick within his own mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Batonnet

"No, Will."

Jack has a bandage on his neck, fibrous and at least two layers thick. Beneath the top layer of pristine white it is stained with spots of old brown blood. It looks gray beneath the failure of cloth to hide it. The wound must need to breathe by now, but Jack is sick of people looking at it.

Will Graham looks him in the eyes, sharing that lucid connection with Jack he'd never asked for. Red rims. Exhaustion. Dark shadows. No sleep. A depthless brown that could drag Will down. There is no light that holds them open, even the lids seeming to sit heavier, weighted. Defeated.

- _what would he have done if his Bella was alive, how would she feel about his carelessness_ -

Jack's hand lifts unconsciously. Touches his neck. Will reminds him of blood.

"I need to see it," Will protests, the first time he asks to see a scene he has already known.

The souls of what he has consumed - foolish to think of souls when he does not believe in them - squirm in his knowledge and knot in his belly.

"Even if that was in my power," Jack tells him without a single waver. "I wouldn't do it."

Will leaves the office, limps out, at least upright.

Even those people who impacted Hannibal Lecter indirectly had shorn away changed. His momentum was enough to leave others flattened and aching behind him. The cane curled in Will's grip to take the weight and the stretch of the deeper cut side leaves him to think of Chilton. 

Will Graham wants access to Dr. Lecter's house. He wants to stand again in the kitchen and feel specters haunting him there, smell the faint earthy scent of herbs in the next room, growing live in the very walls. 

The specific gravity of the place hangs opposite pendulums in his heart and mind. He had found his way there dreaming awake. 

Now, he is barred. Will sits in his car with his hand over the permanent scar of his rebirth. Hannibal had given it to him, just deep enough. Just hard enough that the blood held his alibi.

He had walked from the smoldering remains of his cocoon, born beatific butterfly in the rain without. 

The cut had pierced Will's abdominal wall as Dr. Lecter's words had once pierced his brain, but his surgeon surety had gone no deeper. He had not cut to kill.

Will closes his eyes, his breath of stream of white fog in the cold interior of the car. 

He had sat before seeing Jack too. The thaw on his window from his drive had become a thin rime of ice again. 

He feels for his instinct, with his fingers fondling the new bumps and folds of his scar. The skin feels flaky and dry beneath his fingers. Tender.

In his minds eye he finds blackness, dark. Instead of the slow golden swing of the pendulum, he hears the snap of the fire in Hannibal's hearth, the smell of paper consumed in flame.

In his memory Hannibal speaks of a mind palace, a place time cannot touch unless he allows it.

Will remembers his stream.

He casts a line of memory back, pulling the fly against the current, standing to his chest in the water. It's warm. Red.

Blood.

Someone bangs on the glass window of his car and breaks the spell. The sound is hard, rapping, sharp. Will finds his glasses in his hands.

He puts them on.

Freddie Lounds is at his carside, holding a flashlight in a reverse grip with an amused, ironic smile. 

"I figured you wouldn't stay around here anymore," she says. Her smile is nervous, hopeful. Fishing.

Afraid of the fish.

"Jack call you back?" 

"Jack sent me away," Will answers. "I have nothing for you, Ms. Lounds."

"Even nothing's something," she says brightly. "With the right spin."

Will rolls up the window.

She moves away only when the car starts rolling, mindful of her feet.

-

The house waits for him in it's sea of grass, seeming to float over the late winter ground, the foundation shrouded in the grey mist that crawls close to the ground, creeping up quiet from the lake to touch icy fingers to his ankles when he left the car.

It looks dirty and impure, as if it were wool that had been rubbed along the dirt to pick up impurities.

He opens the door and the dogs rush out, and he hesitates on the point of going in. At last he does so, stripping the driving gloves from his hands, pulling off his coat and making coffee. He steps back onto his porch and watches the dogs move in the fog, coffee cup in hand and eyes on the middle distance.

Will reaches into his mind and pulls up Hannibal's familiar kitchen. The dark tones, the particular light - spilling from overhead, from the windows, in a circle from the open doorway into the dining room. It smells clean and aromatic, the way he recalls it when it was occupied.

The pendulum swings in his mind, the smell changes. Tastes heavy and salt-coppery in his mouth. 

The scene changes. Broken glass. Protruding knives.

A disarray that slid beneath Hannibal's skin like splinters. He finds Hannibal, centers himself there, and looks down. In his mind palace, he stands in Hannibal's place and looks at what he has wrought. 

Will Graham tastes the thoughts of a murderer and the flavors sing down to his bones. It kills him, but it is a poison that nourishes.

He does not know - cannot know - if Hannibal will keep this like Will needs to keep it.

He doubts Hannibal can use it to quite the same effect. He steps forward, tasting Hannibal in his mind, the thoughts gone from the sweet, sugar serenity of surety on which Hannibal so often seemed to sustain himself to the hard icicle taste of conviction in his mouth.

Will's footing slips in the blood, his mind providing a detail that isn't necessary, but that it cannot discard.

He paces. He leaves footprints in sticky red.

"You were supposed to run," he tells the bloody hole in his life.

"I did."

"We both made plans," Hannibal says, immobile in Will's construction of memory. Watching him. "I made plans for you."

Will just looks at him, at how much of Hannibal he has built into his mind. The calm posture, the slow breaths. A resting lion.

"Why didn't your plans include me?"

The question is strange, but not out of line with the ones Hannibal had so often presented.

"Because I'm not a killer, Hannibal," Will answers. He pushes his hands against his face. They are incongruously clean.

"You have killed," Hannibal reminds. "You have proven yourself a wolf and not a dog, Will. You're a killer."

Will feels the phantom bucking of the gun against the web of his hand. The kick of the shotgun against his shoulder. 

He feels the delivery of death in the shock through his collar bone, and sinking into the pit of his stomach.

A nourishment. 

Will Graham had opened his mouth and consumed.

"I took apart what I had built before I left," Hannibal's words, Will's mouth. "Because only with complete destruction can either of us start again."

"A very seamed and lined teacup," Hannibal answers. It is an apology, of a kind. 

"A very wary mongoose," Will corrects him.

Hannibal smiles as Will remembers he can, beautiful and proud. Pleasure in something like Will's company, no easy endurance. It feels like a loss to know the easiness between them will never exist again.

Will steps forward to the knife, embracing what he knows is coming, satisfied with the answers he has drawn. He can't afford more understanding, it will make him hesitate.

It is easier when all the outcomes have narrowed from the hundreds of thousands of red, slick, pumping _possibilities_ borne forward to one final outcome.

Will tears the kitchen from the field of his memories, and he lets it fade, the lights dimming before they surrender to the darkness that tears the walls down. The taste that lives ever at the back of his tongue does not die, though he lifts the coffee mug to his mouth again - cool now, nearly cold. 

Will Graham calls the dogs back with a sharp whistle, and decides he'll move in the summer, to some place on the sea. There will be more boats there, and he can look at the Atlantic and see how much distance is between him and Hannibal and feel partially safe. 

His house drifts high in a field of fog in the looming dark, as quiet a ship at sea as his soul.


End file.
